Digital Forsyth: Through a Social Entrepreneurial Lens
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Digital Forsyth (DF) was a collaborative effort among 4 institutions to create an online collection of digital photos pertaining to Forsyth County (NC) history. Digital Forsyth was a 3 year project that digitized over 12,000 photographs and made them freely available to the world using an innovative WordPress interface that invites user participation through comments. It includes lesson plans for teachers and themed essays.
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Digital Forsyth: Through a Social Entrepreneurial Lens
- 1. Digital Forsyth Through a Social Entrepreneurial Lens Forsyth County Public Library C. G. O’Kelly Library, Winston Salem State University Old Salem Museum and Gardens Z. Smith Reynolds Library/Coy C. Carpenter Library, Wake Forest University Susan Sharpless Smith Digitizing our Cultural History LLAMA Webinar September 19, 2012
- 2. Project’s Genesis • A 2004 brainstorming meeting among 3 Forsyth County Libraries – A desire to identify collaborative projects to • Improve services to the community • Increase opportunities for ongoing interlibrary interaction – Outcome: Everyone had historic photo collections and they were high demand items by our users
- 3. Project Framework • Funded through LSTA Grants (NCEcho) – 2005 Planning Grant – 2006-2009 Multiyear Collaborative Grant • Planning Grant formed framework that was used for the digitization grant
- 4. Project Mission Through digitization, Digital Forsyth, a collaboration of cultural heritage institutions in Forsyth County, North Carolina, facilitates access to cultural, historical and scientific heritage photograph collections, thereby increasing interest in and knowledge of the past and informing future generations. Project Vision Users will turn to Digital Forsyth as the definitive online repository of cultural heritage resources held by Forsyth County institutions.
- 5. Project Processes • Decentralized production • Centralized grant administration • Cross institution collaborative workgroups • Major process goal: Rich user experience – Infrastructure vs. public interface – Creating rich data – Leveraging educational value
- 6. Infrastructure: DSpace wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/jspui/handle/10339/1
- 7. Public Interface: WordPress digitalforsyth.org
- 8. Rich Data
- 9. Educational Value Teacher workshop to create lesson plans
- 10. User Experience Meeting project goals through a rich public interface • Telling stories • Community photo sharing • User commenting
- 11. Telling Stories
- 12. Photo Sharing
- 13. User Commenting
- 14. Who Uses Digital Forsyth?
- 15. Outreach Grant: Preserving Forsyth’s Past
- 16. Contact Information Susan Sharpless Smith Associate Dean Z. Smith Reynolds Library Wake Forest University smithss@wfu.edu
Notas do Editor
- Today I will be talking about a grant funded collaborative multi-year digitization project: Digital Forsyth. The primary goal of this project was to develop a comprehensive online digital collection of photographs pertaining to the history of Forsyth County, North Carolina- ranging from the 19th to 21st centuries. The participating institutions are all located in Winston-Salem, NC and all hold significant complementary pictorial collections that document over 100 years of history in the county. Through this project, 4 institutions (and 5 libraries) wanted to assimilate a shared presentation of Forsyth County history that would exhibit local, regional and statewide value to North Carolina citizens, students, scholars and lifelong learners. The four institutions are listed on this slide:Forsyth County Public LibraryCG O’Kelly Library @ Winston-Salem State University (an HBCU)Wake Forest University: 2 libraries participated: Z. Smith Reynolds (which is the largest and serves the undergraduate and graduate schools and professional students within the Wake Forest Schools of Business and Accountancy, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Wake Forest Divinity School.Coy C. Carpenter Library serves the WFU School of MedicineThe last partner (that joined in the final year of the grant) was Old Salem Museum and Gardens features a living history museum that interprets the restored Moravian community. Over the course of the grant period (2006-2009), the institutions digitized, described and provided free online access to over 12,800 historic images.I’d like to begin by giving a very brief history of the project and its collaborative aspects, and then spend time discussing how we tackled designing a product that engaged our audience and included them in the process. I’ll wrap up by briefly describing another project that resulted from discoveries we made about community needs that bubbled up over the course of the project.
- We made a conscious decision to combine a centralized and decentralized approach. Because our Library had experience in digitization and grant administration, the grant was administered by us and the technical portion of the project was led by us. We established working groups that had representation from each institution and each institution led at least one group (at least in the beginning!): Steering Committee (directors/deans)Project management teamInfrastructure, developed the technical framework that enabled the individual collections to act as an integrate whole: handled technical specifications for delivery of the objects and metadata, developed preservation solutions, etc.Collections, the collections team created selection criteria for choosing photographs, did the selection and initial descriptions, developed subject facets, ensured copyright complianceUser services: user services team conducted surveys and focus groups that would inform the creation of the public interface.Year 3, separate committees were formed for marketing and to develop the educational components for the project.Actual production took place at each individual location. Within each individual institution, the Digital Forsyth participants met regularly and established a workflow that suited their respective physical locations. Following initial central training, each location managed retraining, quality control and hiring/supervision of their scanning and metadata technicians.Today, I particularly want to highlight the work done that impacted the user experience. I want to tell you about three of the processes that were integral in building our user environment: the back-end and public technology, creating rich data, and leveraging educational value
- From the beginning, we knew that we would need to create a custom public interface if we wanted to have a product that allowed users to interact with the site. Keep in mind that this was occurring back in 2008.This meant careful planning to design and execute the technology that would deliver a rich experience while providing the framework to protect and preserve the data. Let’s talk about the infrastructure we put in place first.In 2005, ZSR Library already had a digital asset management system in place (Curator by Endeavor, both of which are now defunct). But even though this system was obsolete before the end of the project, it did a great job managing the data and ensuring its portability. It allowed for a variety of metadata standards including Qualified Dublin Core, it included support for a variety of media types, supported OAI harvesting and was XML based. However, as is true with many of these systems, the default public interface design was not highly customizable and was unable to be programed to reflect the experience we wanted for our users. Early-on in the project, the decision was made to look to WordPress as the solution for the public interface. More about that soon!By the time Curator was discontinued, we were already live and using WordPress. So we just needed to pick a replacement that would serve as the backend management system. DSpace was chosen as the new “backend system” not least because we could migrate the data into it without compromising it to any extent.Any of you who are familiar with DSpace are aware that there is a public interface, but know it is clunky to use. This slide shows a screen shot of one of our DF images and the accompanying metadata. We never intended for this to be the way users would use Digital Forsyth, but because our Library uses the system for our other digital collections and institutional repository, the DF data co-exists in the larger system. However, the sole purpose of DSpace for the Digital Forsyth project was for cataloging and archival storage of the digital objects and metadata.
- As I mentioned on the last slide, a customized version of WordPress has served as the project’s public interface since it was first introduced in late summer 2007. This screenshot shows the same image as I displayed on the previous slide using the Dpace interface. To use WordPress our technical team adapted custom fields min WordPress to qualified Dublin core. Data underwent a mass export from DSpace and then was pulled into WordPress through its import function. We were able to map the categories because WordPress has a hierarchical category structure.The interface was developed through working with user focus groups. Over the course of the grant, there were 2 major interface updates.
- Naturally, we were interested in creating rich data to maximize access to the photos in the combined collections. Creating the process for this was the biggest challenge in the entire project. The cross-institutional Collections Team was charged with creating a workable process for applying metadata consistently across the libraries. Initially, this was not a huge challenge in regard to the basic metadata creation (shown on the right of this slide). We used qualified Dublin Core and the team formed a consensus on which fields to use and how best to populate those fields.The challenge came in the creation and application of subject categories that were formed to create browsable facets (shown on the left side of the screen). It wasn’t too difficult to decide on the 12 top level categories. The interesting (and sometime frustrating) part came in forming the second level categories. There are so many possibilities for creating access points into a photograph that deciding how to describe it can become a complex puzzle. Photos provide information that can’t be found in any other medium. Users aren’t necessarily looking strictly for the overt image subject. They might be researching architectural styles, fashion, social issues or even color. It was easy to get carried away creating categories (not to mention getting bogged down in minutia) and even more challenging to communicate new ones across institutions. We finally limited to two levels with the third level being the specific item. In the final year of the grant, we hired a person whose sole goal was to normalize the categories across the 5 libraries’ records.I also want to point out (while I’m on this screen), our use of a word cloud to help users find what they are looking for. Unlike a traditional word cloud, where the largest words indicate the most used words, ours was flipped. The largest words indicate higher specificity of the word. So you’ll see that Forsyth County (which was used on most records) has over 11,000 uses, while “Adam Spach Rock House” only has 4, so the user can easily locate images related to the one being displayed.
- Another of the primary goals of the project from the beginning was to create a site that would be used by people for educational purposes. Although it might have been enough to simply market the site so that users would know it was available, we felt that we wanted to add value by incorporating contextual materials that could enrich the use of the site. We knew that the k-12 curriculum includes units on state and local history. To that end, in the final year of the grant, we worked with LearnNC to hold a teacher workshop to create lesson plans. NCLearn is a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education program. It provides lesson plans, professional development, and innovative web resources to support teachers, build community, and improve K-12 education in North Carolina.We recruited potential participants through the Forsyth County school system. 60 applications were submitted and 28 participants were selected. We provided pre-workshop training videos and then a full-day workshop was held and 26 lesson plans were created and made available on the DF site.
- Now, I’d like to “show” you some of the interface features that we incorporated to get users involved with the site and its content:Telling StoriesCommunity photo sharingUser Commenting
- As I mentioned, we were interested in including contextual material that would add value to our users.In addition to the educational lesson plan component, we wanted to include essays that would intertwine themes among the different collections and bring greater comprehensive understanding the county’s history. We hired several professional writers to research and write about themes that had been developed by the collections team.By the end of the grant, 32 of these had been published on the site. LearnNC points to these from their site.
- Because the grant limited the inclusion of photos to those already part of the libraries’ collections, when users began contacting us about how to include their images, we had to think creatively about this. We turned to Flickr and set up a Digital Forsyth group where people who used Flickr could tag their images with our group. Our site has a community page where the 20 most recently submitted Flickr photos are embedded. Periodically, I go out to Flickr and search for new images that would enhance the group’s collection and invite the photographer to submit it. Currently the group has 64 members and over 1260 photos.
- We wanted users to interact with the content of the site. If any of you work with photo collections, you know that often they are lacking basic information about where and what they are picturing, as well as who is in them. One of the reasons we selected WordPress was because it already had commenting functionality built in. Our hopes were that users would want to make comments AND that they would assist us by identifying additional information in the images. We’ve had 550 user comments submitted since we started. Users recognize relatives and friends, correct us on the location of buildings and tell their stories that the images bring to mind.Examples“I used to love looking at the WTOB tower at Christmas. I could see it from my grandmother’s back porch on Maplewood Ave. I was told the reason it was taken down was that ice would form on the tower and would fall on the cars parked below. Somehow that reason was just not enough for a little girl who loved the pretty lights. So happy to stumble upon this picture!”In response to a photo of a building burning: “I was born on that day and my Dad was watching the fire instead of being at the hospital while I was born!”“The plane that Truman flew in was a DC 6. My father worked for Douglas Aircraft. He helped remove the upholstery that was in the plane after Truman left office. He took home the scraps of material my mother made them into a hook rug.”The comments continue to come in on a regular basis and provide us with a qualitative viewpoint of the ongoing impact of this project. On our end, each “owning” library responds to the comments that come from the image in their particular collection.
- Thanks to Google Analytics, we are able to gather more than qualitative impressions of impact. We have captured usage data via Google analytics since August 2008, about one year after the site went live to the public. This screenshot shows North Carolina use since 2008.Worldwide, we have had over 171,000 unique visits ad 46,700 of those are return visits. In North Carolina there have been 101,597 and Winston-Salem accounts for 26% of total visits.How do they get here?65% come in as the result of a search16% come from a referral from other websitesfacebook and the partner institutions’ websites), there are 1370 referring sites17% are from direct trafficTotal visits: 217,700, unique: 171,200Page visits: 7.41New visits: 78%Return visits: 46,700Unique Pageviews: 1,218,530North Carolina: 101,987, 46% of total pages; page visits: 11.35; visit duration 5:51.Winston-Salem: 46,870, 21.6% of total; page visits: 13.17 (site average 7.4); visit duration 6.48 (site avg. 3.47);
- In year 3 of DF, we continued to field inquires from small local organizations who needed help to preserve and digitize the unique materials that chronicle their organizations. After assessing the needs of a representative organization, the local YWCA, we decided to submit a proposal for an LSTA Outreach grant for the 2009-2010 year. The grant was awarded. Its goal was to reach out to small Forsyth County organizations to educate them about how to organize and preserve their organizations’ cultural heritage materials. In addition, we established public digitization centers as a new service in the Forsyth County public library system (who we collaborated with on this project). The centers were equipped with digitization equipment, software and trained staff. We hoped that this would provide people with a practical solution that would remove barriers to preserving important local history.As part of the grant, wedesigned educational programming on organizing, describing, preserving and digitizing unique materials. We conducted 5 public day-long workshops and established digitization centers at the main branch of the public library and 4 of its branches. The program has been a success. Two years after the end of the grant, all the digitization centers are still in operation and some of their primary customers are the local historical societies. We were particularly pleased with the outcomes of this grant project that:Gave citizens practical skills to allow them to independently preserve, organize and give access to their important materialsWorked to strengthen local history collections for use by citizens and scholarsEstablished free resources for use of equipment to those who needed them